Animated Flash Superhero at MAX
Nectarine, a Flash animation studio Melbourne, Australia, has produced a 
series of shorts to help illustrate the new functionality available in Flash Professional 8. Mike Downey, the Flash Project Manager at Macromedia, recently screened these shorts at last week’s MAX 2005 event in Anaheim, CA, and he’s made his presentation materials available for download. Included in the ZIP file are the six SWFs animated by Nectarine. The animations include some of the new effects and tricks available in the new version of the software (but unavailable for export to video). A French website is also hosting the shorts.
The shorts were animated by Nectarine’s Steve Piscapo, and they revisit Flash, 
the Macromedia superhero, who Nectarine brought to life earlier this year. He’s sporting a new hero suit, and the production quality is far advanced from his previous appearance. Notice the character ‘Sparkle’ in the earlier version, who is an embodiment Microsoft’s vector-based UI designer of the same name. If you haven’t been following, there’s been much (perhaps undue) hype about Sparkle being a ‘Flash-killer’ which I’m starting to think it’s not.
October 25th, 2005 at 9:56 pm
[spell checked]
If you’ve ever read The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, Think of Sparkle as the super computer “Deep Thought”, whose eventual purpose was to design the computer that would supersede its own limits…
I think people have the wrong impression of sparkle, while it itself may be a worthy competitor to flash I doubt it will be the “flash killer” most people hope it will be. Instead, it will most likely be the tool that will be used to create the mythical flash killer… Maybe Macromedia can use sparkle to create Flash 9, and then we all win
October 28th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
An interesting counterpoint, Ibis. Thanks for checking in to the site. Your flashfilmaker.com site is a regular visit for me.
Keep it up!
-Aaron